UNE VILLE CULTURELLE!

Musée du Luxembourg

Friday morning Tom and I got an early start to see the Chagall exhibit, and although there was a line, this time we toughed it out and viewed the show—which was stunning.  We were already huge Chagall fans, but the focus of this exhibition—Chagall in war and peace—was very moving.  We spent a couple of hours there, but time stood still. . . .

In the evening, we attended a concert/talk on James Joyce and music at the Sorbonne.  Tom had seen a notice for it just the day before at the library of the Centre Culturel Irlandais.  We had nothing else on the calendar for that hour, so we showed up . . . and Tom came away from the evening with an invitation to give a talk in a research group there.  Continued luck of the Irish!

Polidor

With no destination in mind afterwards, we headed out to look for an interesting dinner spot, and we landed at a place that’s apparently very well known: Polidor.  We hear it was featured in the Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris, and we know it has served lots of intellectuals, writers, and ex-pats over its long existence (it was founded in 1845).  And it’s a trip!  The place was packed, but the hostess managed to seat us . . . in the middle of a long table of other guests.  Communal dining!  Old-fashioned French comfort food is what you would call the menu; it’s accompanied by a communal bread basket and water bottle.  Polidor was lively and fun, but I wouldn’t recommend it for a culinary experience as much as for the vibe.  And it proudly proclaims: Polidor n’accepte plus les cartes de credit depuis 1845 (Polidor hasn’t accepted credit cards since 1845).  Still, it was a nice way to end a long and busy day.

La Résistance exhibit

Saturday began with no real plan (other than our Saturday market run) until we were meeting some new friends for dinner.  But we decided to go to a free exhibition on the French Résistance at the magnificent Hôtel de Ville (City Hall).  This exhibit of documents, photographs and film covered the occupation of Paris, the Résistance movement, liberation, and reconstruction.  In many ways, it traced an emotional arc similar to Chagall’s lifetime journey.  Everything was in French, but we managed to make out most of it, though I had a headache by the time we left: translating is hard work . . . and even harder work when you don’t have a dictionary at hand!  

Notre Dame

But what a happy accident we had on the way home.  We noticed that there was an absolute crush of humanity everywhere in the city center—hundreds of people on every bridge, folks lining the streets and squares.  And then we realized that we had stumbled into the moment when the nine new bells of the Cathédrale de Notre Dame de Paris were to sound for the very first time!  We had heard this would happen on Palm Sunday, but it turned out that 6:00 PM on Saturday was the inaugural ringing.

So we stayed in the area to be among the first to hear these new bells that have been constructed to harmonize with the huge Emmanuel bell already in Notre Dame—a beautiful thing to hear and witness!  The Emmanuel bell, the last of the original bells of Notre Dame (the others were destroyed in the French Revolution), has tolled to announce the end of the First and Second World Wars, the liberation of Paris in 1944, and the attack on the twin towers in New York on September 11, 2001.

Bells ringing on big screen

This unexpected pleasure almost made us late for our dinner engagement, but we got home in time to change and head out again.  We were meeting Edward and Freda, an Irish couple whom we first encountered at the Irish Embassy party ten days ago.  They contacted us and invited us to dinner with their good friends, Charles-Henri and Simone.  We had a perfectly delightful evening at La Cigale Recamier, a wonderful French restaurant specializing in soufflés.  Edward and Freda are gracious and fun, and we were really pleased to see them again.

Chagall

But little did we know at the start of the evening that we would see them once again the very next day!  We had plans to meet our friend Catherine MacCarthy for crêpes after mass at the Centre Culturel Irlandais (or “the Irish College,” as everyone here calls it), and Freda and Edward had plans to attend mass as well.  So we all went out for crêpes together afterwards, and we had a great long chat.  This was a bit of a send-off for Catherine, who returns to Ireland next weekend.  We will miss her.  But we also simply enjoyed having some of our various worlds come together as we continue to be amazed by the rich experience we are relishing here in Paris.

Chagall

UNE VILLE TRÈS ANIMÉE!

If this blog claims to be a chronicle of our lives in Paris, it’s been sorely lacking for some time now.  So I will attempt to cover some of the ground we’ve covered, and be forewarned: we haven’t really slowed down!

Le Vrais Paris, Montmartre

Tom’s narrative left you back on St. Patrick’s Day.  Yes, he did add a little blog entry about his Émile Goudeau translation, and there was a picture of Tom in Goudeau’s Square in Montmartre.  That photo was taken last Sunday afternoon when we went up to Montmartre to visit with our old friend Maggie Doherty who has lived in the 18^th arrondissement for almost 30 years. Maggie met us at the Abbesses Metro stop, not far from her apartment, and we went for lunch at a nearby restaurant, Le Vrais Paris. 

There was rain in the air, and it was pretty raw outside, so we warmed up there before hiking up the “Mont” of Montmartre to Sacré Coeur, the huge Basilica built between 1875 and 1914.  Although it’s an impressive structure, Sacré Coeur is somewhat “cold” compared to many of the beautiful cathedrals and churches in Paris.  But it is still a “destination.”  The rain was a little heavier as we left, so we headed to Maggie’s place for a cup of tea and a piece of tart, and then we managed to find, in her neighborhood, an Irish pub serving Guinness—after all, it was actually St. Patrick’s Day, and with names like Doherty, Conboy, and O’Grady, we knew this was also a “destination”!

Café!

Monday was a quiet day of reading and writing, and after my morning class, I finished up two brief articles I had owed to an editor.  On Tuesday, Tom and I met after my French class in Boul’ Mich’ (as Boulevard St. Michel is known to locals!) and went on together to the Marais—an area in the 3^rd and 4^th arrondissements that was home to French nobility during much of Paris’s history.  By the 19^th century, much of the nobility had moved to the St. Germain area, and Le Marais became a center of commerce.  It also became a Jewish quarter of Paris, where many Ashkenazi Jews from eastern Europe found their homes in this city.  It’s a very trendy area of Paris now, with lots of historic sites intermingled with good shopping and eating.  We just wandered and eventually stopped for our obligatory afternoon coffee.

On Wednesday, we worked in the morning and then thought we would go to the Chagall exhibit at the Musée du Luxembourg later in the afernoon.  We walked to the museum and found an incredibly long line.  So we decided to walk from there to Sainte Chapelle, (the chapel of King Louis IX, who later became Saint Louis).  But the line there was also excruciating.  So we just crossed over to the Île Saint Louis—the smaller of the two islands in the middle of the Seine—and passed some time reading in a café there before we went out for a quick meal and then on to a jazz guitar concert.

Frédéric Belinsky

The concert was a tribute to gypsy-jazz guitar legend Django Reinhardt, and the “manouche-style” guitarist was Frédéric Belinsky.  Accompanied by just a rhythm guitarist and a bassist, Belinsky gave a tour-de-force concert—seated on the altar of the Église Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, a 12^th-century gothic church that now serves a Catholic Melkite community.  We had a wonderful evening there!

Mignon!

After my class on Thursday, I took a deep breath, polished up my best French phrases, and got my hair cut!  The air is damp here in Paris in March, and despite my best efforts to leave the house looking reasonably well-coiffed, I turn into a frizzy mess quite quickly.  So I decided I had better just go with nature and be a “curly Kate” for the time being.  That delighted the hairdressers at the Christine Keller salon who seemed mightily impressed with la tête bouclée (the curly head) I put in front of them.  And Tom says the haircut is mignon, so I guess everyone is happy.

Saint-Julien-Le-Pauvre with Notre Dame in background

Frédéric Belinsky Trio

après ÉMILE GOUDEAU . . .

Alors . . . a few weeks before we left for Paris, I began to dust off my French—or, more aptly, began to scrape the rust off my French—of 35 years ago by trying my hand at some translating.  Specifically, I took at look at some French poetry—perhaps not the best idea, as poetry (as Robert Frost once observed) involves “ulteriority”: a slippery use of language and imagery that may have led Frost to observe also (so legend has it) that “poetry is what gets lost in translation.”  Peut-être.

Alors . . . one of the poems I ended up translating was by an obscure poet, Émile Goudeau, associated with the famous 19th-century Montmartre café Le Chat Noir.  It’s a sonnet, but when I began to engage with it I decided, for better or for worse, not to be held hostage by its form: what interested me more than its formal structure was its rhetorical structure—the movement by which the gypsy woman moves from being an object of male desire to being an agent of male despair.  Here’s the original:

LA CHUTE

La gitane aimée et perverse

A déserté les Orients

Aux grands cadres luxuriants,

Pour descendre dans le commerce.

Dans un cabaret elle verse

Des liqueurs aux étudiants ;

Moi, sur mes genoux suppliants

Le désespoir brutal me berce.

Or, nous sommes là quatre ou cinq

Autour de la fille de zinc,

Dont l’astuce froide nous joue.

Mais Samson court à Dalila!

Mon rêve est tombé dans la boue,

Et je l’ai suivi jusque-là.

Here’s my attempt to render it (without rending it) in English:

THE FALL

après Émile Goudeau

Admired and despised, reviled,

desired, she turned

on her gypsy heel

and turned both cheeks

on sumptuous surroundings:

Les Orients.  She went

for company far beneath

herself and now

pours booze for students

in a cabaret where

I delude myself in brute despair,

brought to my knees

(with four or five confrères)

by a barmaid bent

on playing her cold tricks.

Did Samson court Delilah?

My dream falls on the muddy floor.

I follow it there and wallow.

Do I have a poetic leg to stand on?  Here’s a photo of me standing in Place Émile Goudeau in Montmartre a few days ago:

ST PATRICK’S DAY À PARIS . . .

C’est un belle vie!  Last year Katie and I celebrated St. Patrick’s Day in Lubbock, TX with “the in-laws.”  This year we celebrated it in Paris!

France and Ireland have a long shared history—military, political, literary, cultural.  Some of that history is sad, some of it glorious.  France supported Ireland during its failed uprising against British rule in 1798.  Irish women and men, including author Samuel Beckett, played important roles in the French Resistance during the Second World War.  French President Charles de Gaulle was a proud lineal descendant of the McCartan clan from County Down.  The green, white and orange flag of Ireland is modeled on the blue, white and red French tricolour.

Corcoran's Irish Pub

For centuries Paris has been a destination for Irish men and women: for seminarians and scholars, for rebels on the run and disaffected patriots, for writers-in-exile like Beckett, Oscar Wilde and James Joyce.  (Wilde and Beckett are buried in Paris.)  With the collapse in recent years of the once-robust Irish economy known as the Celtic Tiger, a new wave of young Irish men and women have gravitated toward Paris in search of employment.  They have brought their country’s vibrant personality with them to La Ville Lumière, The City of Light.

Small wonder, then, that Paris during St. Patrick’s week is a hub of spirited activity.  Predictably, some of that activity is centered in pubs like Corcoran’s on rue St. André des Arts in the bohemian Latin Quarter, The Coolin in the vibrant Saint-Germain-des-Prés district, and Finnegans Wake, aptly named for its proximity to an area where James Joyce once lived and wrote, not far from the site of the Irish College (founded in 1605), which is now home to Centre Culturel Irlandais.  The Guinness signs worked like magnets for bonafide ex-pats and would-be Paddies alike.

Stephen Rea (l), Neil Jordan (r)

But as we can attest, drink was not the only Irish draw in the city.  On Wednesday evening, the CCI co-sponsored at an international film festival a screening of the darkly comic movie adaptation of Patrick McCabe’s novel The Butcher Boy.  Acclaimed director Neil Jordan and actor Stephen Rea spoke briefly beforehand about their experience making the film, and Ambassador Paul Kavanagh welcomed the audience in impressively fluent French.  With only 84 seats in the theater, we felt lucky to be there.  Of course, we owed our luck to my impressively fluent French, deployed in an email to the theater that morning: Je voudrais, s.v.p., deux billets pour l’évent ce soir—le film Irlandais, <<The Butcher Boy.>>  Peut-être vous pouvez confirmer?

At the Irish Embassy, Paris

After the film we introduced ourselves to the Ambassador.  With typical Irish gregariousness he said, “Why don’t you come ’round to the Embassy tomorrow evening for a little event we’re having, and we can have a good chat.”  (Moral to the story: Always play the Irish card!)  That little event was actually the Embassy’s annual St. Patrick’s soirée for hundreds of members of the expatriate community—a splendid gathering, evidently sponsored in part by the Jameson whiskey distillery.  The Attorney General of Ireland, Máire Whelan (whom we had also met at the movie the night before), offered remarks on behalf of the government back home.  As they say in the old country, “The craic was mighty!”

Notre Dame during Aifreann Naofa

But without a doubt, the highlight of St. Patrick’s week was the first Aifreann Naofa (Holy Mass) ever celebrated in the Irish language at the iconic Cathédrale Notre Dame de Paris.  Renowned for its stunning Gothic architecture, including its legendary gargoyles, and made famous by novelist Victor Hugo and his hunchback Quasimodo, Notre Dame is observing its 850th anniversary this year.  (Next week, on Palm Sunday, a new set of bells will ring out for the first time from the twin towers of the cathedral.)  Hundreds of Irish citizens and descendants turned out for the service as Gaeilge at midday on Saturday.  The principal celebrant of the Mass was County Monaghan native Bishop Noel Treanor.  The thousands of tourists who filed through that landmark attraction during the service must have wondered what language was being spoken and sung from the altar of the very emblem of French Catholicism.

Un Leprechaun!

Given the strong ties between Ireland and Paris, we were surprised to learn that there is no parade marking St. Patrick’s Day itself.  Still, many people dressed in green for the occasion and a few overdressed in leprechaun hats and springy shamrock hairbands.  A few even seemed to underdress in kilts—but they turned out to be Scotsmen in town for the France-Scotland rugby match.

IL A NEIGÉ À PARIS . . .

When we went to bed on Monday night a few flakes of snow were falling here on rue José Maria de Heredia.  We woke up on Tuesday morning to un paysage merveilleux d'hivre!  Even though the accumulation did not amount to much, it snowed non-stop on Tuesday and today temps remain below freezing.  Here are some photos I snapped—some from our little balcony, some plongé dans le coeur de Paris.

Notre rue 

Les velos sont blancs!

Le Metro

Le fenetre

Au coin de la rue

DES MARCHES ET DES MARCHÉS

It seems this blog needs an update, so I am going to offer a quick one, though there’s little time left this evening for it!

Swann et Vincent, 15th arrondissement

We had a very full weekend, for a number of reasons.  We started off the right way on Friday night with dinner out at a tiny local restaurant called Swann et Vincent.  We had seen it a few nights earlier, and I said, “I like the look of that place!”  So after wandering aimlessly for a while in a different area, we ended up in our own backyard.  And, speaking of backyards, the couple sitting directly behind us at the restaurant were English and Scottish, own a flat near ours here in Paris, and currently live in . . . Boston! 

Des olives

Later that night—around midnight, to be exact, niece Molly Carmona—a third year architecture student at Notre Dame—came with two friends, Jenny and Elaine, for a whirlwind Parisian visit.  They arrived around midnight, and after a short night’s sleep, they filled Saturday and Sunday touring the great museums and sights of Paris.  Given their interest in architecture, they had a real field day here!  Our responsibility was primarily to fuel them with croissants, pains au chocolat, and chaussons aux pommes each morning, and they also joined us for dinner and some relaxation on Sunday evening.  Our flat is very comfortable, and I think they enjoyed themselves.

Catherine, Justin, Katie

On Saturday morning we went to the local Saxe-Breteuil market, and then we caught up with Irish friends Catherine and Justin MacCarthy in the early afternoon.  We walked over to meet them at the Centre Culturel Irlandais where Catherine (a poet) is doing a two-month residency (Justin was just here visiting for the weekend).  They wanted to show us their corner of Paris, and what a treat that was.  We first walked to a wonderful little lunch spot called the Jardin des Pâtes (Garden of Pasta), and we had lunch there.  We then went for a stroll in the nearby Jardin des Plantes, a kind of arbortetum with a boulevard of trees and special little nooks and crannies throughout.  It was almost 60 degrees that day, and all of Paris was promenading about!

Justin & Tom

We walked from the Jardin to the River Seine and a short way further to the Institut du Monde Arabe.  This is an extraordinary building that is home and host to the cultural artifacts of the Arab world.  Catherine and Justin wanted to take us to the terrace on top of the building where we enjoyed  tea and coffee in a dramatic setting overlooking the Seine, the Ile de la Cité and the Ile St. Louis.  What a fabulous place to be on a beautiful day!  And then we made our way back toward their quartier, stopping to see a primary site of the round-up of French Jews by Nazis from 1942-44.  We also walked by the Arènes de Lucèce, a park with a first-century Roman wall uncovered during Haussman’s reconstruction of Paris in the nineteenth century.

Notre Dame

When we left Catherine and Justin after a great day, Tom realized he hadn’t brought along his Metro pass, so we decided we would just walk home.  That was fine, but we got pretty tired at the very end.  And when we sat down in our own little place, we realized why: I looked at the pedometer and we had walked more than 28,000 steps that day—over 12 miles!

So, although we could have slept forever after that, we were up in the morning on Sunday to greet our young guests from Rome and to send them on their way into Paris again.  While they were out, we had my old friend Maggie Doherty, now a long-time resident of the Montmartre area of Paris, over for lunch!  Maggie and I had met up near her place on Thursday, but Tom and I enjoyed a leisurely lunch with her chez nous, and then went for a walk out to the Marché du Livres, an antiquarian book market.  A chill descended all afternoon, and by evening it was quite cold.  Molly, Jenny, and Elaine joined us for dinner here, and then we went to bed relatively early as we knew there would be an early wake-up call.

Marché du Livres

Katie & Maggie

Today we had to get out les parapluies and fend off the rain. I began my second week of French, and Tom spent most of the day writing here in the apartment.  Catherine and Justin joined us for a casual supper of soup and salad, and we indulged in some macarons from a local patisserie for dessert.  More rain and possibly some snowflakes in the forecast for tomorrow.  But given what we hear weather-wise from back home in Milton, we can hardly complain . . . .

J'AI BESOIN DE . . .

Des lapins

So . . . this morning Katie headed out the door around 8:30 for the 20-minute walk to Alliance française for her French class.  I’m sure she’ll have lots to say about that experience in a future blog post.  She left me with a shopping list for the Saxe-Breteuil marché that operates on Thursdays and Saturdays on a long plaza a block away from our apartment.  Mostly the market sells freshly butchered meat (including des lapins—rabbits—and des canettes—ducklings) and fresh produce.  Unlike certain Parisians whom we’ve encountered—the utterly unhelpful clerks whom we needed to engage with to buy Metro passes—the vendors are cheerful and friendly, so shopping there is not a daunting experience at all, and it doesn’t require beaucoup de français!

Une canette

In fact, as I was walking to the market, I was practicing thinking in French—J’ai besoin de . . .—and I realized that was exactly the phrase I needed to deploy at each stall where I stopped: “I need . . .”  For example, my first stop: “J’ai besoin de deux poulets rôti”—and Voila!  And so forth and so on: des oeufs, des tomates cerises, des avocats, des champignons . . .  And then I asked for “des petites pommes de terre.”  With a twinkle in his eye, the vendor tried to catch me: “Deux . . . ?”  I laughed and replied:  “Mais non—peut être . . .  quinze?”

My French is rusty after about 35 years of disuse, but it’s coming back.  Le pratique rend parfait: last night we managed to order un bière et un pastis Ricard at a little hole-in-the-wall in Le Marais.  On Saturday, it’s Katie’s turn to try out her newly minted vocabulary and grammar at the market!

THIS PARISIAN LIFE

Well, there’s no comparing this Parisian life with our American life.  That life is filled with getting into cars and racing to work, to the grocery store, to various events on the calendar.  This life is full of walking.  And walking.  And then a little more walking.  Or eating, thinking about eating, drinking coffee (or Pernod, or wine), and then a little more eating. 

People here are clustered in cafés at midday and at day’s end. Dinner begins late, so they are meeting for coffee or apéritifs at 4:00, 5:00, 6:00, 7:00. But a few late coffees have kept each of us up right through the night on different nights, and we can’t keep up with the French on wine and spirits or we would fall asleep before dinner.  There’s a schedule to master in all this, and we are doing our best!

For example, yesterday (Sunday) we rose late because we’d had such interrupted sleep.  But once we were up, we took off walking.  First, we headed down past the École Militaire toward the Eiffel Tower.  The American Library is in that neighborhood, and they were having a book sale.  Any one of you who knows Tom O’Grady will be unsurprised that he needed to check this out—whether or not there’s any room in our American life for more books!

The sale was pretty uninteresting, but while we were in the neighborhood, we checked out the address for the American University of Paris, where Tom and I will spend some time in the coming months.  We were pleased to have a sense of its geographical relationship to us, but we kept moving.

We walked from there along the Seine to the bridge leading to the Place de la Concorde.  This is the largest public square in Paris, built in 1755 to honor King Louis XV.  As you French historians may remember, the statue of Louis XV was torn down during the French Revolution, and the square became known as “Place de la Révolution,” where the guillotine was erected and Louis XVI was executed, along with Marie Antoinette and many others.  There’s a wonderful obelisk with Egyptian hieroglyphics in the center of the square—it was a gift from Egypt to France in the nineteenth century. (We were simply there to check on the location of an amazing event we were attending on Monday, but more on that in a minute.)

Since Concorde has a major Metro stop, we decided to complete our Navigo Pass purchases there, and we are now in possession of monthly Metro passes!  And not a moment too soon—our feet were tired, so we hopped on the Metro to Montparnasse, where we headed to a Sunday-only arts & crafts market at Le Marché Edgar Quinet.  It was interesting, but not tempting, so we picked up a cup of coffee and headed to Shakespeare and Company bookstore to look for a book I wanted—and how amazing to come up out of the Metro and see the Notre Dame cathedral looming above us.  To think this is our playground for this Parisian life . . . .

We’ll write more later about how we are making the most delicious dinners out of our market purchases and about my foray into French language classes (Tom has decided to see how much of his own Canadian schooling in French will come back to him). . . .

But I think I need to jump ahead to the highlight of our Monday: an evening with Ira Glass, host of NPR’s This American Life!  What a treat!

Tom mentioned in the first blogpost that we’d had coffee on Saturday with a friend whom we’d never met.  That friend is Steven Barclay, an extraordinary literary agent whom I’ve worked with for a dozen or so years to bring writers to Stonehill as part of the Chet Raymo Literary Series.  And although Steven and I had never met, we’ve known for some time that we are “kindred spirits,” and I think he and Tom found that they are too. 

Ira Glass et Katie

Well, Steven did most of his growing up in Paris, and tonight he sponsored an event for the school he attended here, the American School of Paris.  Each year, he brings one of the writers he represents to speak at the school and to offer an evening program for parents and friends of the school.  When we discovered we would be in Paris at the same time, Steven graciously invited us to the event, which this year featured Ira Glass, my absolute favorite radio host.  (I know all three of our girls are writhing with jealousy over this!) 

Steven said the event would be “swanky,” and he wasn’t kidding: it was held at the Hôtel de Talleyrand on the Place de la Concorde, and the appetizers and cocktails were elegant.  Ira Glass was introduced by the American Ambassador to France, Charles Rivkin.  And then Ira himself was simply wonderful.  He spoke about how he puts together a story for This American Life, and he used several examples—the girl who was bitten by a shark, the recent spate of murders in Chicago.  Maybe some of you have heard these particular radio stories.  He talked about what radio can do that other media cannot, and what it means to tell a story you cannot “see.”  The environment was intimate (fewer than 200 people), and it was a glorious juxtaposition to have the tools of radio and internet technology nestled among the baroque statues, gilded walls and chandeliered ceilings of the George C. Marshall Center in the Talleyrand.

And for us, as we met other Americans in Paris and then made our way “home” after the event, Ira Glass provided a reminder that, even as we launch “this Parisian life,” a rich American life awaits us when we return.  But we aren’t rushing back yet!

L’AVENTURE COMMENCE . . .

Bonjour . . . et bienvenue à notre blog!  We’ve been in Paris for 48 hours now—time to get this blog up and running, just as we have been up and running . . . or at least walking.

Just as you’d expect from Air France, our Thursday evening flight across the big pond was uneventful and quite restful, and we arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport on Friday morning ready to step right into our Parisian life.  Originally we had planned to take the Metro from CDG into Centre Ville, but with two months worth of luggage, we wisely opted for a taxi.  Our Chinese taxi driver had as much English as we had French—luckily Katie was able to deploy her iPhone GPS, and we made it to our apartment avec pas des problèmes.  (As we drove past the Eiffel Tower I got a laugh out of our driver, despite the language barrier, when I asked, “Qu’est-ce que ce . . .?”)

Our apartment is in the 7th arrondissement—a relatively affluent neighborhood.  We are on the fourth floor in a remarkably comfortable space, all modernized for easy living: 2 spacious bedrooms, a good bathroom and a small but nice kitchen, and a well-lighted living room overlooking our quiet street, Rue José Maria de Heredia, named for a 19th-century Cuban-born French poet.  From the front doorway of our building we have a clear view of the Eiffel Tower about a mile away.

In our first 24 hours here we mostly just explored the immediate area, tracking down grocery stores, checking out bistros and patisseries, and basically trying to get the lay of the land.  We got in some supplies and had a nice meal at a nearby restaurant, Le Sept Quinze—named for its location in those bordering arrondissements.  At 7:30, we were the first diners of the evening and we wondered if we had chosen a dull hole-in-the-wall—but by the time we left, the place was packed with what seemed like mostly locals.  We spent a pleasant hour or so there and felt comfortable trying out our French on the friendly waiter—“Apportez-moi l’addition, s’il-vous-plait?”

In our second 24 hours—yesterday (Saturday)—we ventured a bit farther afield.  We started with a visit to a Starbucks (old habits die hard) about 15 minutes from our apartment, and then made our way to the Saxe-Breteuil open-air market about 5 minutes from our street.  With literally countless vendors set up in stalls, the market offers pretty much everything you could want; we picked up some fresh salmon and a pork tenderloin, some handcut raviolis, and fruits and vegetables—a good starter kit for a couple of meals.

Then we headed into the heart of Paris, where we had a rendezvous scheduled for 4:00—a meeting with an old friend of Katie’s and a new friend of mine . . . whom we had never met before in person!  (More on him in a later blog: we’re invited to an event he’s hosting on Monday evening.)  We had a long cuppa java with him in Le Select, a famous café popular with ex-pat Americans dating back at least to Hemingway’s time in the 1920s, in the Montparnasse area.

But before that we did some general wandering—specifically in search of Rue St. André des Arts, a narrow street in the heart of the so-called Latin Quarter.  One of my sabbatical research projects has a connection to that street—good to get the work underway!

After our coffee at Le Select we wound our way back to our apartment.  We stopped along the way to buy Metro passes—an elaborate process involving a cheesy photo booth and lots of confusion.  We still have at least one more step to complete the process—we’ll get that taken care of today, and maybe we’ll get a local phone for me: starting on Monday, Katie and I will be heading in different directions from each other as we settle into our sabbatical undertakings—but we don’t want to lose track of each other!

Katie is wearing a pedometer.  Yesterday she (and I too!) walked 20,696 steps—8.6 miles.  No wonder we were exhausted at the end of the day.